I play hockey (field hockey), and have since I was...I dunno, maybe 5 years old? I grew up in a 'hockey family', my mum and dad both play (and do or have played for state teams), and my dad's been a state coach too. My older brother also plays. I love it, it's active, it's tough, decent sized field so you get a good run around.

I moved interstate and started playing down here after a couple of years off playing, where I did miss it quite a bit. I have a pretty intense uni load this year (doing my masters) so decided to not take it too seriously and just play a lower grade, so I only had to train once a week as opposed to two. The people in my team are really nice, really welcoming though I think there is a bit of cattiness between some of the grades...as i'm new to the club i'm not well aware of it yet. I had fun and there was no pressure, but playing in a lower grade means you get a lower grade coach and I didn't feel like I learned anything new or touched up on any of my skills like I would have liked. I think next season I'll try for A grade so I can go to more intense trainings and get better coaching.

So generally we'd train once a week, with an hour long running session before hand, then an hour on the turf. A grade does this twice a week. My old club in melbourne did two trainings, one 1 hour and one 1.5 hour plus running. I'm pretty competitive when i'm playing, but I don't take it too seriously on the whole, not in this grade anyway.

My football season just finished. We were training 2 or 3 times per week depending on weather. One of those was early morning (7-8am), which was great.

I played men's first team for the club I was at so we were competitive but not at the top grade in the city (3rd division).

The club is a nightmare and I won't be going back there. Plus, the players weren't great so we didn't play as well as we could have. I got the ball about 15-20% of the times I should have got it because of bad decisions, which was really frustrating. Some of the team are nice but none of them are people i'd be good friends with - too norm/lad-esque for me.

The DIY aspect of the sport is fantastic, some of the skaters' skills are amazing and the theatrics are always good (ie, derby names, bout themes, uniforms, etc).

The team I was part of had a real problem with drama, backbiting and 'executive decisions' which was really upsetting at times. Too many people wanted to be the rockstar player and this occasionally could be really demoralizing. The negativity coming from all of this got too much for me so I bowed out.

I swam competitively in high school and played rugby throughout college.

Swimming is weird in that you're part of a team but unless you're swimming relays, it's really mostly an individual sport.

Rugby is awesome and easily the most fun I've ever had doing exercise in my life. It's the first sport I've ever played where I didn't get yelled at for running into people! Sometimes I miss it so much buuuuut it's a sport where injuries are pretty common and now that I'm responsible for other human beings, it's not really a reasonable risk for me to be taking. If I break my ankle, I'm still going to have to take care of my kid, so for both our sake's, I'm done for now.

In general, I love playing team sports because I am very, very lazy and having a team makes me accountable to someone other than myself. It gives me a reason to consistently workout/show up for something. I am also a super awkward introvert and I have a much easier time socializing if there's some sorta concrete social context, like I am talking to you about this because we are at a practice together and I know we have at least this sport as a common interest.